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Nickelodeon Reviving ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ as TV Miniseries

Are You Afraid of the Dark? is not just a timeless question, but also one of the very coolest – and scariest – kids TV shows ever devised, and now it’s coming back from the dead as part of a sudden surge in reboots over at Nickelodeon.

If you were a kid growing up in the 90s then it’s a safe bet you sat in front of your TV sets, in the dark and indulged your fears with the spooktacular anthology series about a secret society of kids who meet every night to tell ghost stories around a campfire. From 1990 to 1996, the show terrified audience all over the world with stories about evil clowns, a monkey’s paw, vampires, and Leprechaun’s. It would be revived briefly in 1999 but failed to live up to its former glory.

In a press release given out today a Nickelodeon spokesperson said:

“The beloved anthology series will return this October as a brand-new miniseries and follow new members of the Midnight Society as they gather around a campfire in the woods to share scary stories. The miniseries will coincide with the upcoming Are You Afraid of the Dark? theatrical movie from Paramount Pictures, Paramount Players’, and Nickelodeon Movies, in theaters October 2019.”

Any concerns that an Are You Afraid of the Dark movie would be too watered down in today’s environment were quickly quashed when the writer Gary Dauberman told Slash Film:

“That show is so important to me. I didn’t want to age it down too much because for it’s time, it had some really disturbing episodes and some really dark episodes. Not every story the Midnight Society told ended with happily ever after or a person learning their lesson and it will never happen again. I really embraced that side of things and I think it’s been a long time. I think fear is healthy for kids. I don’t think we have to always sand down the edges of things and that’s something I really wanted to do with Are You Afraid of the Dark? I think it is scary and I think kids will be scared watching it at times, and also they’ll laugh at times. I think it’s got a great message. I think it’s got a great heart to it but it is still scary. I think that’s great. I think it’s going to open it up to a wider audience.”

We can only hope that the same will go for the miniseries, which should land sometime between now and the film’s intended release for Halloween 2019.